seulement un rêve (only a dream)
by OceanPenguin
Summary: There is a Before and After. Marinette knows of the Before the way she knows of her grandfather who died before she was born – through stories and "remember whens." After is blackouts, bruises she can't remember. She'll be stuck in After, going crazy in her own mind until the end of time. OR Marinette suffers from dissociative identity disorder. At least, she thinks she does.


A/N: Perhaps you've read "Life is But a Dream." I didn't really like the way the story was planned, so I scrapped it and wrote something else. It's different, Inception-ish but doesn't have all of the elements of the original movie, so you don't have to know the movie to understand what's going on here. I suppose a quick skim of a Wiki article could work, if one really was curious.

On a completely separate note, I have fulfilled one of the things on my bucket list: I've managed to eat an entirely spicy meal. Behold - chicken tikka masala over rice dotted with Sriracha and spicy V8. I sort of just sipped on the veggie juice and ate rice when the heat from the chicken got a little much. I'm surprised my taste buds didn't give out on me yesterday. I'm probably inordinately proud of this. I don't know why.

DID = Dissociative Identity Disorder = Multiple Personality Disorder.

Enjoy!

* * *

Sometimes, Marinette doesn't know who she is. What to think anymore. She has blackouts, periods of amnesia where she doesn't remember who she is or what she did.

Once, when she catches a glimpse of a Halloween costume – black and red with little polka dots and a headband for antennae – she disappears. Marinette's shoved into the back of her mind, packed up and vacuum-sealed into an airtight plastic bag, left preserved until she wakes up in the driver's seat of her car with a small pouch tucked into the front seat.

News sites the next morning speak of two masked vigilantes running around, swinging – she blacks out.

Blackouts aren't normal. But they are, for someone with her traumatic past and upbringing. That's what Carmen says, and her government-assigned therapist hasn't been wrong yet.

Marinette hates her therapist. Carmen is disgustingly insightful and worryingly omniscient. Marinette's pills are all prescribed for her; her blackouts lessen but they make her feel woozy and disoriented. She's half in and half out of the driver's seat, and she prefers to have both hands on the wheel or to have none at all. Carmen regularly checks her sleeping log, her daily journal, the amount of pills left in the bottle and the residual amount of drugs in her bloodstream; Carmen takes meticulous notes during their meetings and won't let Marinette lie.

Marinette needs to lie, she doesn't want to be cut open with a fine scalpel, organs neatly labeled and laid out on a table to be studied and every single molecule in her body catalogued in hateful manila folders.

Her mother loves Carmen though, and that's the only reason why Marinette continues to go.

That, and the fact she never has blackouts in front of Carmen.

* * *

She abhors her dreams. They appear, disappear, swirl around in the drain and leak out her ears.

They're fantastical, wonderful, everything that she wants from life and cannot have. She dreams of visions of a normal life, one with a cat and a dog and a job that doesn't require her to lie and kill and steal. She can protect who she wants, be a vigilante when she can, and expose all the dirty, dirty secrets behind the curtains.

Marinette dreams that she's nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and she's stepping out with a diploma and a bachelor's degree, neatly pressed and fresh in her hand. She's majoring in fashion design. She makes clothes for the wealthy. She loves her work and she wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

She dreams that she dresses up in a ladybug suit. Polka dots and little bits of red and white and black, and she has a partner in cat ears. She loves him and he loves her and they have a bond, a bond no one can cross, and it assuages the loneliness she feels like a bone deep ache, a cancer, lymphoma crawling through her veins, cancelling the cold in her heart.

Worthless fantasies, the lot of them.

She calls the boy Chat. It's a funny name , but then again, she refers to herself as Ladybug.

Instead, she's a twenty-two year old who barely exists on paper. She can't hold down a normal job – yet she continues working towards a psychology degree and lies to her roommate about wanting to travel. She does her best to project her zeal for life, sprinkling on the slightest hint of a French accent to add to the story that she's an international student studying, on a lark, in a college in the States.

Her cover identity is much more fascinating than she is, and for that, she hates Gabrielle Zhang.

* * *

The truth is that Marinette Dupain-Cheng is a leech. She makes her way in the world through a singular ability to extract information from those around her, whether from slicing it out of them like a cancerous tumor, or from massaging it out of their pores.

She was a little too good at solving mysteries. Unfortunately, combined with a propensity to hack, lie, or temporarily borrow things without returning them, she was recruited to work in government information services fresh out of high school. It was either that or get thrown into jail for the sheer number of laws she had broken.

There is a Before and After. Marinette knows of the Before the way she knows of her grandfather who died before she was born – through stories and reminiscent memories and "remember whens." After is blackouts, carefully placed hands and eyes, bruises she doesn't remember getting and a presence shoving her to the back of her own mind.

She tried begging out before. It didn't work. She'll be stuck in After, going crazy in her own mind until the end of time.

* * *

Adrien bumps into her on a Wednesday. She hates Wednesdays, so it's ironic that one of her favorite people on Earth found her on those humps of the week.

He is tall, blond, thin. He masquerades as a model in the daytime and sells information at night. She knows that he's in her line of business within the first few seconds of meeting him: his posture is too tight, his forehead forever slightly creased, and his eyes hold an unending glint of humor.

Adrien claims that he loves to smoke, but his packet of cigarettes are untouched. He eschews wearing the color green because he says that there's no shade to match his eyes, but she knows that he doesn't wear it because the pain of his mother's death is still raw, three years later; green was her favorite color. His father does not come up in conversation.

He does not ask why she never brings up her own parents or friends. She is grateful for it.

The world of information sharing – she might as well go ahead and say it – spying – is tenuous and delicate, like a city in the clouds. And much like clouds, scum abounds. Money rules everything. Your employer may pretend to fight for some honor or ideal, but you will commit ignoble deeds in their name.

There are no friends in this business. Friendly acquaintances, yes. But no friends. Nothing more, either.

Marinette wonders if she is a fool for considering Adrien as something more.

She thinks not. He is, after all, one of her few exceptions. The only exception.

He knows about the blackouts. Adrien had mentioned a Ladybug and Marinette was shunted into the side of her mind.

"All right?" he asked an undeterminable number of minutes later.

"Fine." The facsimile of a smile felt wrong on her face, but she kept it up anyways.

"I'll see you at nine, right?" He winked, the sunlight glinting off his hair, and she woke up in bed, safely tucked under the covers, a lump of clothing in the corner, the clock shining a lurid 2:00 AM onto the wall.

The bone deep ache of her body drags her back to sleep.

* * *

Gabrielle Zhang is studying to be a psychologist. She's applying to med school the year after the next, after she finishes her master degree in the five year combined bachelor's and master's program. Gabrielle is a model student and caring friend. She's a hospital intern on weekdays.

She knows her psych material inside out.

Gabrielle is a page in the book that is Marinette. What Gabrielle knows, Marinette knows too.

Self-diagnosis is strongly discouraged, but when Marinette begins to suspect that she has dissociative identity disorder, she doesn't banish the notion. She lets the idea sit and ferment in her brain, the idea that there's a completely separate person living inside her body.

Marinette hides this revelation. She knows that Adrien knows already; sometimes, he looks at her like she's a different person and he's been there for a few of her blackouts. He won't betray her. They are friends in a business that does not have friends and he won't sell her out for any small thing. She's worth more than this.

Her employers must not know. They would've terminated her contract and forced her to go underground, so she hides it the best she can. It helps that she has no blackouts when she meets with Carmen, who will, no doubt, break patient-therapist confidentiality if something like this were to show up on her records.

She's semi-successful. There are more and more leaks, more and more slips showing, cracks forming on the surface, but Marinette is bone. She can take all of the hairline fractures and more without breaking in an ominous clack.

* * *

One of her biggest slips is in front of Carmen. Triggers abound everywhere, and Marinette has to fight the urge to shake her head free of the cloudy wisps bound to her mind.

"Blackouts are controlled?" Her therapist taps her carmine nails against the furniture. Clack, clack, clack. There are little black dots on the nails. Marinette's vision begins to blur.

"Yes."

"I see your medicine is under control."

"One dose a day." She fights to stay upright and jerks her line of sight to Carmen's lab coat.

"Good. Very good." Carmen's fingernails flick the page and catch the edge of Marinette's consciousness. The black dots begin to metamorphose into Rorschach ink blots. She sees the beginnings of a devil and a firebird.

"Any developments or improvements lately?" Carmen has placed her fingers neatly in a row along the edge of Marinette's file, and her eyes are glinting in the afternoon light. She smiles, tilts her head in a way that implies that she knows something Marinette does not.

Marinette despises that expression.

"No," she says instead. She tries to keep it from being too curt, but drags out the word a smidge of a second too long instead. The visions vanish.

Carmen's eyebrows lift and she scrawls a note in the file, presumably noting that Marinette had broken character. Marinette has to throw the bloodhound off the scent.

"What I meant to say was," and here Marinette injects a glimmer of hesitation, "is there a schedule for my medication? Seeing that I'm getting better, after all."

"Ah." Carmen set the notebook and crossed her legs at the knee, leaned forward and adjusted her glasses. "You see, Marinette, oftentimes mental illnesses linger in the back of our minds. So we've got to keep taking the medication to keep the bogeymen away, so to speak. You're a psych major – " she checks the notebook and her voice shifts – "you've changed your major to social work, but as I was saying, as a psych major before, you've taken several health classes and you know that an unrelenting regimen of medication is the best cure."

A social work major? Since when? Gabrielle Zhang had dreamed of being a psychologist since she was young. Carmen knew that, even if she was treating Marinette, not Gabrielle, that cover identities rarely change.

"Will that be all for today?" Carmen's voice had returned to its normal pitch and tone.

"Yes. Thank you, doctor." Marinette unfolds her hands and begins to rise from the couch, careful to keep her face in a warm, open expression.

She's halfway to the door before Carmen's voice called out to her. "Marinette, if you don't mind me asking, why did you change your major?"

Marinette has no idea either. Her cover was assigned by her employers, and she had not received a missive about changing her mission. She turns and bestows a trembling, cautious smile on her therapist, who seems more interested in this question than anything else in their months together. "I thought I'd do more good out there in the public. I've been planning on double majoring with psych as well."

"Good, good." To her relief, Carmen seems to accept this answer, and wishes her a good day. How could the therapist not know the cover inside out? After the incident, Carmen was assigned to Marinette _because_ she specialized in spies and PTSD.

Marinette walks out of the clinic briskly, drives home sedately, and runs into her dorm room, whereupon she loses all memory of what happens for the next five hours.

* * *

She jerks awake on a Sunday night. Heart beating in her throat, she bolts upright and stares at the piercing green numbers on her clock glaring at her from the nightstand.

Marinette pats the smooth duvet and notes the harsh, angular shadows the moon casts on the room. There is a desk in the corner, a stack of books on the floor, and a closed closet door. Her legs are elongated under the covers of the bed, and she spots the markings of a safe hidden in the edge of the bed frame.

She is alone in the room. This is not a place she has been before.

She releases a breath. Carefully, ever so carefully, she lifts the covers and swings her feet onto the hardwood floor. Her backpack is on the space next to her, as is a herringbone-patterned bag. It is too chic to be hers.

There is a sticky note on the nightstand. _Sleep well._ The handwriting is elegant and slanted to the right, with slight wobbles in the _p_ and in the _e._ Perhaps the note was written using the right hand, but the writer is originally left-handed.

Adrien is left-handed, but prefers to write with his right to trick casual observers and other agents, freelanced or employed.

She looks around the room again. There is the Spartan sparity, the well-concealed hinges that lead to fake doors and safes, and the herringbone bag, which has no tag attached to it but a small glittering symbol on the front.

So Marinette is in Adrien's guest room. Or bedroom.

But why?

Her last blackout was with Carmen two weeks ago. After a solid week without being punted across her mind, Marinette had assumed the blackouts were decreasing. Perhaps the other personality was moving out, merging back into the original consciousness, leaving her alone.

She doubts it. Her phone is fully charged and reads 9:13 pm. The day is May 25, 2022. The last time she remembers being awake is 10 pm, Saturday night, May 24.

She's lost an entire day.

The other personality has never been so strong. Marinette needs help.

Her phone slips out of her hand and clatters onto the duvet, and her finger absently traces a pattern on the surface.

The phone clicks and allows entry.

The Samsung logo stares back up at her. She has only ever used an iPhone. She should not know how to use this. But as her fingers flick and tap, adjust volume and insert earbuds into her ear, she is forced to realize that this is also her phone.

The phone of the otherperson living inside of her, at the very least.

Yet, when she clicks on the mail icon at the bottom of the screen, she's forced to the realization that, perhaps, the personality who shoves her into a box doesn't do it on the regular because it's inconvenient for them, not because they lack the strength.

Perhaps Marinette Dupain-Cheng is only allowed to play because the other personality is indifferent.

She does not like the thought.

Her fingers are absently drawing up emails, all linked to her primary account as well as several she does not remember creating. There seems to be one from an online fashion course that promises a bachelor's, nearly completed. One address contains sparse information, the type Marinette receives as tips and advice from others in her line of work or simply contacts she has in the world. This address, however, seems to be solely focused on the sightings of crimes and vigilantes based on a ladybug and a cat. This is the first time Marinette can remember seeing anything of the two figures without blacking out.

Ladybug must be what her alter ego was doing in its spare time, then, in addition to the online fashion degree. Why is she not blacking out? Is the other personality gone?

She can feel the faint, fuzzy edges of memories she never had before. Flashes of green irises, the swirls of a baton in the night, an unusually well-balanced yo-yo snaking around a wrist and yanking a pigeon man back onto the ground.

Her body reaches into the herringbone bag place next to her and withdraws a torn, stained suit stamped with polka dots. The moonlight bleaches the color from the fabric and renders it silver with dark spots. A yo-yo, something that she would've believed had come from a drugstore, sits on a neatly attached pouch in the hip of the suit.

When she swings the toy into the air, is dances into a figure eight and then rewraps the strings around itself. It bounces without a sound, rolls without pausing or jumping, even over noticeable dents on the floor. The string of the yo-yo is smooth and too strong to be cut, even if with diamond-edged blade she keeps with her.

Any technology that is sufficiently advanced can be and will be qualified as magic.

Either she stole this from the military, unlikely seeing as the government preferred to conceal gadgets in more useful decoys, or this thing was from the future. Seeing that time travel has not been invented yet, she's left with the third conclusion: the yo-yo wis magical.

That conclusion is absurd. Therefore, the yo-yo must be extraordinarily technologically advanced.

Who gave it to her? Where did she find it? Most importantly, why is everything reminiscent of the dreams she had every night?

Perhaps her dreams are simply suppressed memories. Her desire to be a vigilante, after that one mission that sent her to Carmen, had expressed itself in a different manner. It wouldn't have been too hard to steal something so cutting edge – gambling tables and back alleyways, and she knows where to look, where treasure groves were for secrets like the yo-yo, things that no one believed the capability in or shouldn't have existed in the first place.

The mesmerizing black and red lacquer of the weapon reflects the moon's gleam. The yo-yo spins sloppily in the moonlight, casting a wavering shadow against the floor and the rumpled covers.

The bed. She is a guest in a place that she presumes means her no harm, presumably Adrien's place. He knows about her alter ego and most likely the vigilante work that went with it. He was also likely an accomplice in it, either her cat partner that she went out with at night or a techie who fed her tips on who and where to target.

Perhaps he is the cat. It would explain the costume in the bag and the green eyes she remembers. Only he ever had eyes that green.

She turns her head and glances at the clock. 9:46 pm. It was 9:13 pm when she woke up. She reprimands herself for being so foolish for spending so much time in coming to these realizations, whether or not she was in neutral territory. She hasn't been overly cautious of minimizing noise, either.

Either Adrien doesn't care, or he's giving her time to recuperate. It is best to get up, anyways, and get moving.

She carefully places the costume back in the bag but keeps the yo-yo out; at any rate, it would be less fatal than a gun. Marinette carries her purse and the bag out the door that doesn't creak, glances up and down the hallway, and makes her way towards the living room, the only room that emits a source of light.

She's never been in Adrien's apartment before. Neither has he been in hers. They're not that type of friends.

A shadow rises from the couch. Blond hair, green eyes, mirthful glint. Adrien. "Have you recovered?"

He flicks the ash from a cigarette that she has never seen him smoke. The silver tray in front of him is littered with cigarette butts.

"Yes." She's unsure if he's addressing her as Marinette or as her other personality.

"Took quite a beating back there."

A beating? Instantly, the image of a man dressed in an outrageous costume hurling construction equipment at her appears in her mind.

"Quite." Better to keep her answers short so she can pass it off as exhaustion, if questioned in either of her forms.

"Don't front with me, Marinette. We both know Ladybug is taking a toll on your health. You don't need to be the hero all the time."

"I'm not," she says. Her mouth continues to move as if on autopilot. "I've got Chat, don't I?"

He sighs, a harsh gust of air through his nose. "I'm not going to be there all the time. We both know this, and yet you recklessly go after criminals alone. And 9 out of 10 times, you end up recuperating here with injuries you could've avoided if I were there!"

She has never seen him lose his cool. Clearly, this argument was one that they've hashed out several times. "You know me," she says lightly. She tests her tongue; no response rests there. "I've always got to be there."

"Yes, yes you do," he groans. "You –" Adrien whips around. "You're not Marinette."

"I am Marinette."

"Let me rephrase that. You're not _Ladybug_. You're _Marinette_."

Ah. He'd been conversing with her alter ego all this time, then, the times before this night. "So it would seem."

"Integration?"

"I believe I'm beginning to experience a few of Ladybug's memories." She pauses. Adrien wouldn't lie to her, would he? "It's DID, isn't it?"

"Yes." His eye twitched. He was hiding something.

"I suspected one other personality."

"No, you've splintered into three."

"Who?" This was news.

"That's not a normal yo-yo, Marinette."

She fingers the weapon, the cool metal molded to her fingers. "I know. Any technology that's sufficiently advanced passes for magic."

"That _is_ magic. There's nothing even close to what that thing can do. My baton…" he withdraws a slim gray rod from his pack. "This thing – it breaks the laws of physics. It creates its own matter without energy loss. This shouldn't – it can't even exist."

Adrien is frantic, ill at ease in the safety of his own home. She's never seen him less than self-assured.

"Ladybug, she said she would send a friend over to give us these. And then your face rippled, and the air rippled, and all of a sudden you were holding costumes and weapons and trackers and all sorts of things. It was you, but it wasn't. You were someone else and Ladybug emerged and said that was Marie."

"You must be dreaming." She presses her fingers to her eyes. None of this could be real.

"It happened," he insisted. "Look." He fumbles at his belt and withdraws the gleaming length of leather, which begins to snake back and forth. "Sensors tell me this is simply leather and cloth. Yet it seems to have its own will once I release it into the air."

"I'm dreaming." She must have ingested some sort of hallucinatory drug. Adrien continues to babble nonsense. Slowly, the scene in front of her detaches into a painted landscape, the water colors bleeding into each other as she sees herself in her mind's eye lying in the dream machine.

This is all a test. She's in a dream, three layers deep, personalities strewn around her in attempts to throw off a constructed monster she imagined in the first layer. Marinette must integrate herself by waking up.

Perhaps Adrien is a construct of her imagination. She will be sad to see him go, but she must wake up. There is no true life to live in a dream.

A gun materializes in her hand. Smooth leather grip, a hefty weight to barrel, fully loaded and the safety off.

She lifts it to her head. Adrien is still talking. "It's real, see?" The belt folds and purrs at his hands.

His eyes snap up to her hand. "Marinette, don't!" Adrien lunges, hand outreached, belt stretched out to snatch the gun.

She pulls the trigger.

* * *

Marinette wakes up, luxuriates in the sunshine streaming through the windows of the apartment.

Adrien steps through the doorway. His hair is rumpled and his skin is dull. "I just had a horrible dream, Marinette. I thought we were spies and you killed yourself."

He followed her here? Adrien must've been a deeper component to her psyche than she thought.

Through her muzzy eyes, she can make out the faint outline of a t-shirt and sweatpants. They must be roommates, then. She sits up.

"I wouldn't." She scrubs a hand through her hair, ducking her face down to arrange her facial features into a comforting, open expression. She looks up. "I wouldn't, you know that."

His face creases into a smile. She notes the faint lines around his face. He is older. They are older.

Adrien steps across the room and drops a kiss on her head. "I know. Just gave me a scare. You know how dreams are."

So they're together. She suspected as much.

Marinette hugs him. "I know." She relaxes into the moment, the comfort of the reaffirmation of a bond with another human being, and then releases her arms.

"I'll go make breakfast." Adrien disappears into the bedroom and soon afterwards, Marinette hears the banging of pots and pans in the kitchen.

She pats the bed. There's a warm spot and rumpled covers, and several golden hairs were on the pillow. Adrien and she – they had already moved in together. She thumbs her phone, a sleek, futuristic thing lying on the desk next to the bed.

The date pops up. Marinette's 29. The calendar screams at her that she has a meeting at Agreste industries in two hours, that she has clients coming in, and that her collection is to be unveiled in a runway show in two months.

Marinette thumbs through the photos, combs through her various social media sites, and digs into her emails.

So. She is a relatively successful fashion designer, was in a loving relationship – her finger glints in the sunlight – no, she is engaged – surrounded by friends, and apparently is planning to get a dog.

This is the life she would've chosen for herself. Career fulfillment, loving relationships, a pet, a house – she loves it all.

She wants it all.

Would it be so bad to live out the rest of her days in a dream?

She gets up and off the bed, considers it seriously, and walks out the door.

The kitchen looks well-used and lived in. The toaster is humming along happily and the fried eggs are gurgling in the pan.

She doesn't know, and it scares her. The temptation is to stay is more than she thinks she can take.

"Adrien," she says, "would you mind if your life was a dream?"

"Why would I want a life other than this one?" He smiles at her, absently wiggling the skillet to stop the eggs from sticking to the pan.

"What if – what if your dreams were definitely better than your life? What if you were living a dream you loved and your life – you didn't know what would happen?"

He turns down the flame on the stove and serves the eggs. The plates clack against each other. The forks clink, a discordant noise that jangles with the pain behind the back of her head.

"I guess... I guess I don't know," he says at last. He brings over the plates and hands one to her, plucking a bit of toast from the toaster and placing it on her plate.

"On one hand, I suppose I'd be happy being where I was, in the dream. But I'd know it wasn't the life I created for myself, and I want to know what I can do. I think, if I really wanted to make my own life, I'd wake up."

He forks a bit of the eggs into his mouth. "What brings on this question, Marie?"

"I was reading a book on my phone. It had an interesting question in it." She smiles, hoping to reassure him.

He smiles back. "Well, I hope you've got some insight."

"I did, thanks."

After a few more bites, the food turns to ash in her mouth. She excuses herself to the bathroom and sees the gray dust staining her teeth. She spits it out, rinses her mouth furiously, and sits on the toilet, debating.

It isn't wrong to want it all. But it isn't the life she created for herself, and she knows that she wants to make her own way in the world.

Everything has to be real, and that's the problem with this dream. It isn't real.

She thinks of a gun, a small, smooth gun, the sort of gun she used in the last layer of the dream. It materializes in her hand, comfortable and hefty.

Marinette lifts the gun to her head.

She takes a deep breath, and pulls the trigger.

Adrien screams.

* * *

She's in a dark, crowded train car. The stink of human filth and misery surrounds her, and the wheels roll and roll and roll.

Adrien is crowded up against her. "We'll be fine, I promise." His green eyes blaze in the dark. "I won't let you be bought away. It won't happen."

"Okay." She leans into his touch. She must really love the projection that she named Adrien. He is not real, however, and so she cannot bring him to life with her. She will miss him.

Marinette conjures up the same gun she has used to kick herself out of the past two layers. It appears readily, familiar in her grip.

She fires.

* * *

She wakes up.

Feeling comes back to her limbs slowly, woozily. Her ears filter the sound, first a brown noise of small talk and hushing whispers, and finally the individual voices she was aiming to impress – her mentor, the test administrator, and the spy agency's hiring manager.

There's a second of instant regret before she squashes it down. Back in the second layer of the dream, she could've just gone on her way, safe in the dream house. But now – now, she has to make her own way. Just as she wished.

This world seems real enough. She concentrates on materializing a gun, and none appears. This world is real.

The aftermath is a blur. She hears the beeping of the heart monitor and blinks open her eyes, and then is swept away into a bombardment of questions and a battery of tests. They don't seem to trust her – odd, considering that the dream was her initiation test – and although various people attempt to shove food and water into her mouth, she refuses to eat, noticing that no one else is touching the food.

She's sent home with a pat on her back, food in her pocket, and an assignment in her bag.

Marinette simpers her way through it. Her mentor will think that Marinette's practicing, others will believe she's overcompensating. She doesn't care what they think. She just needs to hide that fact that she's lived through nearly a decade of life in a night of dreaming, that she carries herself differently, understands herself differently, is a different person. She feels twenty-five. She is eighteen. They don't seem to notice.

What she does care about, however, is their insistence on her eating. Why would it matter so much to them? She sighs and cracks open the seal of the water bottle, only to dump it into a mug and pull out her kit of litmus paper. The bubbles in the water stay suspiciously long, disappearing only after a minute, and although the litmus strip doesn't noticeably change color shade, she doesn't dare drink it.

She throws out the mug and empties the water into the sewage system, and then places the plastic bottle in recycling. The sandwich that was given receives the honor of being smashed and then flushed down the toilet. The food wasn't safe to eat, and there was probably an agent checking her trash in the next day or two.

The food had been so insistently shoved in her that there must've been some compound that they wanted her to experience.

Her answer comes the next day.

When she was tested, she was also sent into a dream with three other people – two of who had already been deployed on a mission. Alya sidled up to her the very next day and wonders aloud if Marinette had also received an assignment.

"Yeah," Marinette tells her. "You?"

Alya wrinkles her nose. "It's in the Amazon. I swear, I hate jungles, and they totally gave it to me on purpose."

That was likely. "Maybe you can get yourself a nice pet, wrap the perp up in jungle vines."

"I'd love to." She pauses, then spots the sandwich rack in the corner of the break room. "Hey! They've got those sandwiches again!"

"Sandwiches?"

"Yeah. You know the ones they gave us yesterday? So good." Alya walks to the rack and takes a look at the offerings. "Want one? They've got turkey and ham."

There's a senior agent lurking unobtrusively by the coffee filter. "Sure. Thanks," Marinette calls back. She pockets the sandwich and hightails it out of there, flushing it into a public restroom's toilet in the Louvre. The agency was just below the museum; the restroom was highly convenient.

Alya doesn't remember what the test of initiation even is. In fact, as Marinette goes around asking others what they remembered from test, she gets blank looks and the joke that no one remembers anything from the test. She laughs along.

Ah.

So the agency was trying to wipe her memory, then. Well.

Marinette checks her memory every morning and nothing changes. She records the majority of her dreams into paper and encrypted data bits, right after waking up, and hopes the spy agency doesn't find them. They've probably thought she already ate the sandwich, and therefore doesn't need to be vaporized. She's sent on her mission not long after, and takes care to present herself as Marinette pre-dream.

She doubts that any of the people she met in the dream were real. Yet they shaped her just as much as if they were.

* * *

Some days, she misses the life she had in the second layer of the dream the most. She wishes for fashion runways, the creative process, even dorm life. Being stuck in limbo, enrolled in college, and working to extract information while wondering if she was going to be killed was frustrating and boring in comparison, especially without a partner.

On a whim, she decides to enroll on an online fashion course. She already has years and years of memories on designing; the degree she was working towards was a refresher. And if she needed to disappear, well – her stunt as a spy has thoroughly covered that topic.

Her life as Gabrielle Zhang wasn't too bad. She enjoyed psychology and fashion, so she pursues both degrees in her spare time. Most of the knowledge is bottled and ready to use in her brain already, and so after several batteries of tests, she's allowed to take advanced psychology courses in her first year.

Sometimes she wants a drink, and then mourns being nineteen again. Her mentor had made it clear that underage drinking was not an option.

* * *

She doesn't see anyone she recognizes from the dream until a few months later, right after she's finishing up a third mission. There's a blue-haired boy roaming the campus of the college she used to go – at least, the college Gabrielle Zhang had enrolled in. He has the same oversized headphones, the same twitching nose, and the same donkey-like laugh; he is the same in real life as he was in the dream, despite her never having actually met him prior to being plugged into the machine.

Perhaps Adrien is real too.

The thought gives her tingles. She squashes it down. It was best not to give herself false hope.

It is some stroke of cosmic irony that she meets Adrien the way she met him the first time. Wednesday, in all of its humpbacked glory, rushed upon her one scalding August afternoon. She had been tailing a mark from afar, posing as a college student.

She wants to laugh. She's been through college twice already, and she's arranged herself into the quintessential model: sunny, bright, intellectual, simultaneously sure and unsure of her place in life. Marinette peers into windows, catching the reflection of the mark behind her, a tall thin businessman in an impeccably tailored suit.

Too impeccable. The razor sharp silhouette and subtle black on black patterning reeked of Etro; her mark is a low-ranking financial advisor. He can't afford the thousand dollar price tag.

The imposter's blond hair gleams in the light. It's a convenient calling beacon, signaling her to his location at all times. She artfully bumps into him, spilling the coffee just a touch too close to the material. Marinette waits for him to brush past her so she could plant a tracker on his body, but he pulls her into a crushing hug instead.

"Marinette!" The force inherent in his wiry arms really does propel her coffee forward and onto the person next to her, whose angry tirade fills the air.

Her ears must not be working. She knows that voice, the one that only appears in her dreams. Marintte mumbles an apology and makes to extract herself from this embrace; there is a small dagger concealed on her hip, and it would be so easy to shift herself and stab this man in the side of his gut and run.

He is an imposter. Is this another test?

Perhaps she's dreaming. The gun she imagines does not materialize. Perhaps it is a broken dream.

The arms give her a bit of a shake, another squeeze, and then release her. Hands, large and thin, cup her face. "Don't shoot yourself, Marinette. I'm real."

She doesn't think he is. She twists, squirms out of his arms, bends the joint and snaps her hand around his wrist. She drags him out of the public light and into the narrow space between two buildings.

"Who are you?" She snarls into his ear, and the whiff of cologne she picks up is identical to Adrien's scent. He had told her he had it custom made, and true to his word, she had never found it in a commercial store after waking up.

His hair is longer, styled firmly and stiffly. She hates it. The bump of a dagger is sheathed along his belt. Was he here to kill her?

"No, no," Adrien rushes out. "No killing. The mark sent me here because he thought he was being followed."

His vowels are crisp, just the way he used to be in all the layers of her dream. "I'm not that sloppy."

"You're not. But your aid is."

She frowned. "He's new. I trained him better than that."

"Sloppy."

"My medical record?" She had told him, once, during a drunk conversation in Brussels, in the dream. If he recognized her – if he didn't lose his memory and if he was real – then he'd retain what she told him. Her information had been wiped off most information systems and heavily encrypted, and her health problems had never changed, whether or not she was in a dream.

"Pyloric stenosis. Scar on your stomach. Cat allergy. Pollen allergy. Dust mite allergy. Inability to ingest beer yet attempts to every Saturday. Eats a pint of ice cream whenever – " he mumbles noisily, then bursts through her hand covering his mouth, " – you see the Pixar short Bao."

"That's enough, thanks." Her ears are heating up. "Got it. You're – you." The warm person she was strangling was Adrien. The warm person in her arms was Adrien. She loves Adrien.

Adrien is alive. He's not a figment of her imagination.

She releases her hold on his wrist and tackles him in a hug. "I thought you weren't real." Her voice is muffled in his blazer, and to her disgust, she can feel a faint prickling in her eyes. Adrien makes no move to push her sopping face away from his expensive suit.

"I'm real." His voice is gentle as he ducks over her, comforting arms around her body. He kisses her forehead. It feels strangely natural.

"We're real."

"Yes. Yes, we are."

* * *

"It was … traumatizing, to say the least, when I had to watch you kill yourself." Adrien pokes at his fries with his fork.

"I, ah, didn't consider that when I shot myself." Marinette looks down at her burger. Once appetizing, the smell of the cooling juices made her stomach roil. The red, raw inside – she pushes it away.

"You didn't think I was real. It made sense at the time. But the trauma of just – just seeing your body lying on the floor of the bathroom, my living room, that goddamned cart – the blood trickling out of your head and the bullet lodged in the ceiling – it was a lot."

"Not too much."

"No."

"Good."

* * *

"There are so many people in real life who appeared in my dream. Like that one over there." Marinette jerks her head. "And that one. And that one. They're everywhere. It makes no sense though. Did the government really drug an entire city, send them to sleep, and then have them wake up?"

"Probably. You never know what's going to happen."

"I do well enough for myself."

"Yes, yes, we all know you're the one who took down that good-for-nothing fish monger."

"He was poisoning people with fugu fish!"

"I see. So very important."

She snorts. "When several different diplomats are going to die at an international meeting, I'd say it's pretty high up on the list." Marinette reaches out and links his hand in hers, swings them back and forth.

"Sure." Adrien winks. "We both know it's because you secretly hated that the woman gutted the fish alive."

"No comment."

He laughs, and she leans up to kiss him. They make a very convincing couple, considering that they were one, and although her mentor wasn't happy about it, she relented at the notion of Marinette having another person to watch her back.

Missions are more fun with Adrien around. His cigarette pack, she discovers, doubles in use as a handy projectile, which he throws –

The sound of a gunshot rings out behind them.

"Run!"

She sprints out of the street, Adrien on her tail, and reaches back into her pocket for her custom yo-yo. She throws the thing straight out in the air and attaches it to a light post and then launches herself into the air.

Adrien follows on his baton, a similar replica to what he had in the dream.

It turned out that these weapons had already been in the making after all , and she only had to pull and yank a few strings to get them.

She lands, breathless, on the roof of a building and ducks into the small hidey-hole where Adrien is waiting. She falls into his arms, exhilarated, and calls the special ops team to come take care of the shooter.

Alya will be thrilled to have another mission.

Adrien pulls her in close, and they wait for the call telling them that things were clear.

She reaches out and touches the buttery velvet of the coat she gave him that first Christmas. He leans back, brushes her hair from her forehead, and she revels in the pressure of his lips on her hair.

They are real.

"I think I know what I'm most grateful for after waking up." Her voice is muffled, and the breeze carries her words away. Adrien hears them all the same.

"Yeah?"

"It's not the job. Not that I've lived a decade and have what I want. It's that I – I get more of you." She can feel his chuckle vibrating in his chest and the sense of wonder reverberating through the air.

"Yeah," he agrees. "The best part is that I get more of you."

* * *

A/N: This is inspired by "In Our Line of Work" by enjambament; so far, I've only found it on AO3. It's really very good.

Inception-inspired, not quite Inception. So some elements have been changed around a bit; I mostly just wanted the whole dreams and layers part.

I hoped you liked it.


End file.
